One Per Cent

Can video games quell nightmares?

Video games may get a bad rap, but their ability to desensitise players to violence could help soldiers sleep better. According to an online survey of 98 military personnel, regularly playing war games like Call of Duty decreased the level of harm and aggression experienced when they dreamed about war. Soldiers who didn’t play video games reported having more violent dreams combined with a sense of helplessness, says Jayne Gackenbach of Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, who presented her findings at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.

Goal-line technology failure

It’s back to the drawing board for the 10 companies hoping their technology will be used to detect when a soccer ball crosses the goal line. After independent tests at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, only two methods could detect a ball thrown into an empty net – and even then not every time. Hawkeye, the ball-tracking technology familiar from tennis and cricket that relies on high-speed cameras to work out where the ball went, didn’t participate this time, but will take part in the next phase. Another method to be tested is a microchip inside a ball that senses a magnetic field created by wires carrying current buried beneath the goal.

Dirty green rickshaws

There is no point putting a clean fuel in a dirty engine. So says Conor Reynolds and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who examined the impact of the Indian government’s decision to convert all vehicles in Delhi to compressed natural gas in 2003 to improve the city’s air quality. The team found

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